Women in "Japan Incorporated": Outsiders or Catalysts for Change?

Junichi Goto

No 4366, IDB Publications (Working Papers) from Inter-American Development Bank

Abstract: Although Japan is much richer than Latin America and income distribution in Japan generally is much more equitable than in Latin America, the Japanese gender gap is one of the worst in the world, much worse than that of many Latin American countries. Using various data, I have tried in the present paper to explain the apparent paradox of the existence of a huge gender gap in an egalitarian society. The most probable explanation seems to be that women are often kept away from the mainstream system of Japan Incorporated, mainly due to career interruption for marriage and/or childbearing. Possible prescriptions for narrowing the gender gap in Japan seem to be twofold: (i) measures to include women within the mainstream system of Japan Incorporated and (ii) measures to make Japan Incorporated more humane to everyone, both men and women. Although the data presented in the paper are mainly Japanese data, there are many important lessons here for Latin America as well.

Keywords: female work force; gender gap (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2000-01
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://publications.iadb.org/publications/english ... for-Change%C2%A0.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:idb:brikps:4366

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IDB Publications (Working Papers) from Inter-American Development Bank Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Felipe Herrera Library ().